Based on playwright Lluïsa Cunillé’s Barcelona, Map of Shadows, Ventura Pons’s richly textured nocturne, Barcelona (A Map) is an intimate and atmospheric rumination on urban architectures and shared spaces as integral projections of anonymous, emotional landscapes. Ostensibly capturing an evening in the life of an elderly couple, Rosa (Núria Espert) and her dying husband, a […]
The disjunction between moral and bureaucratic law, meaning and intent shapes the discourse of Corneliu Porumboiu’s meticulously observed, if clinical and muted procedural film, Police, Adjective. Assigned to conduct surveillance on a typical, middle-class teenager named Alex (Alexandru Sabadac) who is suspected of dealing drugs, junior detective and newlywed, Cristi (Dragos Bucur) spends his days […]
Deep in the Woods (Benoît Jacquot) Having been going through something of film burnout that began midway through the New York Film Festival last year, I had planned to attend only a few screenings from this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema as a way of working through the inertia. The film that finally succeeded in […]
Dark City is a haunting, surreal, and stunning cinematic achievement from Alex Proyas: an amalgam of German expressionism, science fiction and film noir. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens at midnight in a bathtub, paranoid and amnesiac, with a primitive instrument on the floor, a bloody knife on the table, and a woman’s corpse behind the […]
Something of a hybrid between the sardonic humor of a talkative Otar Iosseliani or Béla Tarr and the vérité-like, social realism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a thoughtful and incisive slice-of-life comedy on the impersonalization (and desensitization) of institutional health care. Exploring similar issues of entrenched bureaucracy […]
Robots of Sodom and Every Evening Freedom (Tom Kalin) Two video excerpts from a larger work in progress entitled Behold Goliath or The Boy With the Filthy Laugh based on the experimental fiction of Alfred Chester, Robots of Sodom (from In Praise of Vespasian) and Every Evening Freedom (from Behold Goliath) are composed primarily of […]